Tag Archive for: Darwin

Increasing northern Australia’s fuel reserves is about more than storage

The past year has seen major progress in increasing the Northern Territory’s fuel storage capacity and fuel stockholdings—and there’s more to come. The expansion is spread across airfields and ports and comprises different fuel types, and, notably, the majority of the increase has come from projects to support both Australian and US military operations.

The fuel storage capacity at Royal Australian Air Force Base Darwin has been augmented by two new fuel tanks built as part of US Force Posture Initiatives. The recently completed project provided two ‘cut and cover’ tanks with a capacity of 8 million litres each.

Across the city at HMAS Coonawarra, planned infrastructure improvements include a new ready-use fuel facility providing a storage capacity of 6 million litres of diesel. Importantly, the associated distribution system includes connection to existing wharves, allowing for the efficient refuelling of the Royal Australian Navy’s patrol boat fleet.

As part of the upgrades announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison at RAAF Base Tindal, an aviation fuel farm will be constructed providing a total storage capacity of 6 million litres. The distribution system supporting the farm will enable parked aircraft to be refuelled via trucks or directly using a hydrant system. The supporting infrastructure is designed to be integrated with another planned fuel farm that will be built to support the US Force Posture Initiatives.

The most significant construction will take place at the port of Darwin. In the wake of the joint announcement at the 2020 AUSMIN meeting of the establishment of a US-funded, commercially operated military fuel reserve in Darwin, the US Defense Logistics Agency has released a request for information for fuel operations support at the Port of Darwin.

The request seeks information from industry for capabilities, interest and potential sources for the receipt, storage and delivery of fuel from a facility that could hold 190 million litres of JP5-grade aviation turbine fuel (the primary jet fuel for the US Navy) and 110 million litres of commercial jet fuel. It also states that the expected throughput of fuel is around 64 million litres per year. While this would be enough to refuel more than 2,000 737s, it’s more likely the fuel will be used to resupply US Navy Military Sealift Command oilers to refuel US Navy ships at sea.

The Australian government’s $200 million diesel storage program, launched in January, provides another opportunity for increasing the fuel storage capacity in the north. The funding will support the construction of multiple diesel storage facilities across the country to hold an expected total of 780 million litres. The extra storage will assist Australia in meeting its minimum International Energy Agency stockholding obligations.

The NT Land Development Corporation has identified available land at Darwin’s East Arm port industrial estate, where both the US strategic fuel reserve facility and a new diesel storage facility could be constructed. However, the site is adjacent to the established Vopak terminal, the largest fuel storage facility in the Northern Territory.

While sensible from a cost and efficiency perspective, co-location increases risk and reduces resilience. If constructed at East Arm, both new facilities would be reliant on the current road and rail infrastructure to transport fuel to customers. In addition, offloading from ships would be dependent on access to the wharf leased by Chinese-owned company Landbridge and the single existing pipeline.

It would be better to construct a new port facility at another location, such as the previously identified Glyde Point site. While it would be more expensive, a new deep-water port co-located with the US strategic fuel reserve and national diesel storage facility would provide redundancy in the event the East Arm area was out of action for any reason. It would also increase Darwin’s overall port capacity, enabling a greater number of visits from military and commercial ships.

Despite the new projects, there’s still work to do. Increased storage capacity is all for nothing without fuel to fill the tanks. The key vulnerabilities for fuel supply in Australia continue to be the lack of domestic production and the fragility of logistics supply chains. Little of Australia’s fuel is produced in northern Australia, so it must come in either by ship from the north or by road and rail from the south. No aviation fuel is produced in Australia, so it all needs to be shipped in from overseas.

An increase storage capacity will also increase the demand on transport infrastructure. Darwin is serviced by a single road and a single rail route from the south, both of which are subject to temporary closures in the wet season. For RAAF Tindal, road delivery is the only option—a planned rail spur to the base was cancelled in 2020. Adding to the fragility is the limited availability of road trains and railway rolling stock.

The construction of additional fuel storage in the Northern Territory is a good first step in building national resilience. Follow-on projects that address Australia’s fuel-production and fuel-refining capacity and that strengthen supply chains will be required to truly deliver the fuel security the nation needs.

Remembering the bombing of Darwin

If sometimes it seems that governments rush to appoint inquiries or royal commissions, then I want to assure you: this is no modern-day phenomenon.

The bombing of Darwin, on this day 79 years ago, prompted a swift response from the Commonwealth. On 3 March 1942, Justice Charles Lowe, a Victorian Supreme Court judge, was appointed to conduct a commission of inquiry into the events of 19 February.

Lowe acted with great haste and, in the early hours of the following morning, 4 March, just two weeks after the bombing, he was on a plane to Darwin to begin his inquiry.

And he quickly gained great personal insights—the Royal Australian Air Force’s Darwin airfield was bombed at 2 pm on the day of his arrival.

The purpose of Lowe’s inquiry was to report on the damage sustained, the number of casualties, the degree of cooperation between the armed services, the steps taken to defend the town, whether military and civilian commanders failed to discharge their responsibilities, and the level of the preparedness of military and civil authorities.

However, something quite critical was missing from his terms of reference. That is, what steps had the Commonwealth government taken to ensure that Darwin was properly protected in the first place?

Certainly, it was fair to ask whether the military leaders in Darwin had done enough. However, they could work only with the tools they were given. And those very few tools were given to them by the Commonwealth.

Darwin was desperately underprepared for what occurred on 19 February 1942.

Lowe, however, would not need to level any criticism at the Commonwealth in his report, because it was conveniently exempted from his line of inquiry.

Of course, we know that even before this, the first attack on Australian soil, our service people were already stretched in places near and far.

We were in France and Italy, the Mediterranean and North Africa, and Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Singapore had fallen days before, leading to the horrific enslavement of 15,000 Australian personnel.

But everyone—that is, everyone in senior political and military positions—knew that an attack on Darwin was coming. And yet the city had no functioning radar. Darwin’s early warning system was what locals could see in the sky with their own eyes.

Japanese observation aircraft were seen flying over Darwin in the days immediately prior to the attacks. An American freighter came under attack on the Wessel Islands off Arnhem Land the day before. A Japanese aircraft carrier was observed lurking in the Flores Sea.

These were heavy hints.

At the time, a young woman named Betty Page had a job with military intelligence censoring all mail that left Darwin, cutting out the parts of letters that might have told of boats on the harbour, movements of troops or, really, anything that described life in Darwin.

Page (later Duke) recalled in a 1992 interview with the Northern Territory Archives Service that by the time she’d finished cutting out the problematic parts of letters, they went back into the envelope looking like paper lace.

The authorities took those measures because they knew the threat to Darwin was real.

Even so, Page, who undertook secretarial duties in an office with excellent insights into the coming storm of terror, was not ready for it.

No one was.

On 19 February, she heard the planes and said to a colleague: ‘Oh, isn’t it lovely, the Americans are arriving.’ Then the bombs started falling.

Page, putting on her tin hat and carrying her first-aid kit, rushed out to help people who had been hurt.

Just 200 metres from the Darwin Cenotaph War Memorial, near the old Hotel Darwin site, a bomb landed and Page was flung, concussed, to the ground. She got up and kept helping the injured, not realising that she herself was badly wounded by shrapnel.

She was taken to hospital but had to run when it was hit in the second raid.

Darwin took a terrible toll that day.

And we are entitled to ask: are we any better defended all these years on?

I think the answer to that is yes.

One of the constants of politics is that our national leaders, who are responsible for our country’s defence, have to strike a balance between the requirement to spend money on war craft as a form of insurance and the very real need to satisfy the everyday demands of the population.

We, as a people, would surely much rather go about the business of building roads, hospitals and schools ahead of buying weapons and building defences that may never be used. And Covid-19 has shown us that we need to dig deep into our nation’s cash resources to keep the country moving.

But the experience of Darwin in 1942 has taught us that we can never rely on hope as a deterrent.

We now have long-range radar guarding the north. We’re about to have a squadron of F-35 fighter jets at RAAF Base Tindal. Our navy is positioning new vessels here. We are moving fast into the era of unmanned defences, our training ranges are the world’s best and our alliances are strong.

And, of course, old enemies are now the closest of friends, and that is particularly evident in Darwin, with Japan being a major trade partner through the Ichthys LNG project and taking a presence in our skies with joint exercises.

But we do know that one thing has not changed since 1942. Darwin is critical to Australia’s forward defence and integral to our national security. Geography will always matter and Darwin remains Australia’s watchtower in the Indo-Pacific.

That is why we hold close the events of 19 February.

Here, in Darwin, we do not forget. Not ever. It is not because we glorify war. It is not because we are on the alert for imminent attack. There is no threat ringing in our ears as we go about our daily business.

This day reminds us that Darwin, and indeed the entire north of Australia, play an important role in the security and prosperity of this nation.

It was true then, and it is true now.

And it is only by remembering that we can truly say: lest we forget.

More investment needed to keep northern Australia’s military ranges world-class

Northern Australia can expect to see more visits from US forces, which will create both economic and strategic benefits for Australia.

Two recent US government decisions are set to change how the US military, and particularly the US Marine Corps, will operate in northern Australia.

The first major change was the announcement at the 2020 AUSMIN meeting that the US and Australia intend to establish a US-funded, commercially operated strategic military fuel reserve in Darwin. The proposed facility will join a network of other US military strategic reserves spread across the Indo-Pacific in locations such as South Korea, Japan, Guam, Singapore, Hawaii and Alaska.

While the details of fuel types, grades and capacities have yet to be released, one would anticipate that they would cover the spectrum required to operate all types of military aircraft, ships and ground equipment employed by the US military.

When added to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s earlier announcement of significant infrastructure works at Royal Australian Air Force Base Tindal, designed to support visiting US Air Force aircraft up to and including B-52 bombers, the fuel reserve cements northern Australia’s role as an integral part of the US deployment strategy in the Indo-Pacific.

As ASPI’s Peter Jennings wrote recently, ‘No one builds a big petrol station without planning to use it’, and you can say the same about constructing hardstands, fuel storage and weapon magazines at RAAF Tindal. We can certainly expect more frequent visits to RAAF bases Darwin and Tindal by US Air Force aircraft in the future.

The second recent major announcement from the US was the release of the commandant of the US Marine Corps’ planning guidance. General David H. Berger lays out a radical new vision for the marines covering force design, warfighting, education and training, core values, and command and leadership. In the guidance, Berger designates the III Marine Expeditionary Force, based in Okinawa, as the main focus of effort—showing that the Pacific is at the fore in the marines’ thinking.

Perhaps the biggest message in the commandant’s planning guidance is that the US Marine Corps will change the way it fights. Berger has determined that large, cumbersome equipment and concentrated forces will be easily targeted in an age of long-range precision weapons. Consequently, the marines need to act to change the calculus of any adversary.

The marines will become a lighter, faster, more agile force supported by weapons and sensors with longer range and endurance. The Abrams tanks and bridging battalions will go, artillery cannon batteries will be significantly reduced, and other capabilities such as fixed- and rotary-wing aviation are also being trimmed. Berger says training facilities and ranges are antiquated and his force lacks the necessary simulators to sustain its readiness.

This is where northern Australia plays a part. For the marines, a new strategy demands a need to train in a new way. The Marine Rotational Force—Darwin deploys because Australia offers a strategic location in the Indo-Pacific to conduct realistic, multi-faceted, high-end training. The feedback from the marines is clear—they love Australia and its physically and mentally challenging training facilities. And with the Pacific now the corps’ primary focus, expect bigger deployments in the future.

The Northern Territory hosts the best military training ranges in Australia and arguably some of the best the world. Bradshaw Field Training Area, Mount Bundey Training Area and the Delamere Air Weapons Range together amount to 12,000 square kilometres, or five times the size of the Australian Capital Territory. In US terms, that’s about the size of Connecticut, and in UK terms it’s more than half the size of Wales. Add the maritime training and firing areas in the Timor and Arafura seas, and the facilities and ranges in the Northern Territory can meet most of the training needs of visiting US forces. While it’s difficult for the US Marine Corps and US Army to find live-firing ranges on home soil where they can launch Hellfire missiles, opportunities abound in Australia.

Already electronically connected as part of the North Australian Range Complex, the vast open areas and associated airspace enable scalable manoeuvre exercises for land forces and air combat, close air support and bombing training for air forces. As the Mobile Threat Training Emitter System comes online it will also allow for training in the electromagnetic spectrum. These elements will enable combined arms training on a scale unachievable elsewhere, providing the perfect environment for the marines to apply their new strategy.

By further amalgamating training programs, Australian and US forces can exercise alongside each other, enhancing interoperability and strengthening deterrence. Importantly, they can also act as each other’s opponents, testing skills and concepts.

Both Berger and the newly appointed chief of the US Air Force, General Charles Q. Brown Jr, took their positions immediately following senior command appointments in the Pacific and are no strangers to Australia. They have both visited the Northern Territory in the past few years and are fully aware of the importance the bases and training ranges have for their respective services.

To remain relevant in a rapidly changing world, northern Australia’s training areas and ranges need to keep pace with the modern threat environment and accommodate modern techniques and procedures. They need to be treated and managed as an integrated weapons system in their own right, and their future development must be guided by a deliberate plan to invest, renew and upgrade. Implementing such a plan will produce a unique, advanced training environment that meets the needs of the Australian Defence Force and visiting US forces into the future—and, as an added benefit, will also attract regional and international partners.

Australia’s north needs people and people need a resilient economy

It’s hard to argue against the importance of a modern coastal city in Australia’s Top End to geopolitics, the economy and the nation’s security. Darwin’s long history as a military post attests to that.

Populations thrive when people live in viable ambient environments, have access to prosperous local economies and can participate in community life. In recent years, Darwin’s economy has struggled in key areas. The challenges faced by the Northern Territory government are significant and fiscal belt-tightening is embodied in its budget recovery plan.

A variety of economic opportunities should be encouraged. These range from investment in commercialisation of natural resources to the development of critical water infrastructure and capitalising on Darwin’s proximity to Southeast Asia.

Darwin enjoyed an energy boom in the early 2000s as ConocoPhillips built the city’s first LNG processing plant. This continued when Inpex announced its $37 billion LNG plant and pipeline to address Japanese demand. But economic activity flattened with the plant’s completion in 2018.

Last year the NT gas taskforce was established to support and expand Darwin’s role as an LNG export hub, to grow the gas supply and service industry. Sources of support for significant infrastructure investment, such as the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, exist to provide loans to infrastructure projects across the nation’s north. These links should be encouraged.

With Darwin’s annual wet season, it seems counterintuitive that the city needs a more resilient and better-managed water supply. But the need for better water management has long been recognised and is reflected in Darwin’s water strategy and climate change plan, and the territory government’s 10-year infrastructure plan.

Darwin’s water situation was also listed in the 2016 Australian infrastructure plan as a medium-term issue of importance, with a timeframe of five to 10 years. Ahead of it are two other important items: enhancing essential services in remote communities and upgrading the Tanami Road from Alice Springs to Halls Creek in Western Australia. These items, too, may be some time in coming. They exist on paper as ‘initiatives’—potential infrastructure solutions for which a business case has not yet been completed—and not as projects underway.

While potable water is essential for normal life, the need to diversify Darwin’s water supply seems to be drastically under-recognised at the federal level. Anecdotal evidence suggests also that the owners of larger properties near the capital are having to drill bores to ever-increasing depths to access water.

Given the great emphasis on water issues in territory planning documents and the difficulties with accessing bore water, it seems incongruous that a critical service such as potable water is so underrated as a priority in national infrastructure planning. This is an issue where the territory and federal governments should engage in detailed negotiations.

The third growth opportunity is in the digital economy. While this area is being examined by the NT government in its infrastructure plans, there are opportunities for more innovative thinking that makes the most of Darwin’s proximity to Southeast Asia.

The NT could promote the development of a subsea internet link between Darwin and Singapore via East Timor, which is less than 700 kilometres away. This would add resilience to Australia’s global connectivity and support other investments in the digital economy for Darwin.

The logic for this, from a national resilience perspective, is that there are currently only two landfalls for subsea internet cables in Australia: Perth and Sydney. Historically, 95–99% of the country’s internet needs have been serviced by a limited number of undersea cables coming into these locations. While there’s more than one cable in Sydney and Perth, having connections at more than two locations makes sense not just in terms of redundancy.

The Singapore-to-Perth subsea connection (approximately 4,600 kilometres in length) has been increasingly unreliable in recent years. When the link failed, internet traffic was routinely diverted through the eastern seaboard, resulting in slower transmission speeds. A new cable from Singapore to Perth was brought into service late last year.

A connection (with a landing station) to the new 9,600-kilometre Japan–Guam–Australia cable is being built in Maroochydore on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. This link to Asia is expected to be operational in mid-2020 and it’s estimated that the project will add up to $900 million to the state economy and boost local employment.

A subsea internet link to Southeast Asia seems especially worthy of deeper investigation given current plans for extensive internet commerce and connectivity across the region as outlined in ASEAN’s master plan.

A related area of possible development for Darwin, given the size of its harbour, is to host submarine cable maintenance services for the region. The South East Asia and Indian Ocean Cable Maintenance Agreement (SEAIOCMA) is a cooperative entity managed by 46 submarine cable owners to repair and sustain these cables.

As its name suggests, SEAIOCMA spans much of the Indian Ocean and all of Southeast Asia. It also covers large parts of East Asia and Australia. A dedicated repair ship is based at Subic Bay in the Philippines, and support services in Batangas provide repair, reinstatement and preventive maintenance of cable systems. The current cable maintenance agreement expires on 31 December 2022 and a more central maintenance node in Darwin could be an attractive option.

Defence and security will always make Darwin a priority from a national perspective but, as our northernmost capital city, different ideas to make the city more economically resilient need to be supported. Darwin will always have a ‘spirit of place’ as long as people want to live there.

It’s already a ‘smart’ place, but it needs encouragement and access to investment funds to be an ‘innovative’ place.

The time to act is now.

Abe’s historic visit to Darwin a moment of truth for the rules-based order

This month, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is attending two major regional summits, the East Asia Summit in Singapore and APEC in Papua New Guinea. Between the two summits, Abe is meeting with his Australian counterpart, Scott Morrison, in Darwin in the first visit to the city by a Japanese prime minister.

Why has Abe chosen to stop off in Darwin rather than the Australian capital? Three purposes motivate this visit in the context of the severe competition between the US and China and the temporary rapprochement between Japan and China.

First, the Darwin visit aims to publicise the further enhancement of Japan–Australia security cooperation. Despite the uncertainty over the details of the reciprocal access agreement, which will facilitate joint military exercises and mutual visits between Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) and the Australian Defence Force, Abe’s landing on the key military site highlights Japan’s willingness to institutionalise bilateral cooperation and, more importantly, trilateral cooperation involving the US.

Facing the Timor Sea and the Indonesian archipelago, and looking out towards the South China Sea, Darwin is key to the US military presence in Southeast Asia. It was Darwin where former US president Barack Obama announced the deployment of the Marine Air–Ground Task Force in November 2011. Last month, 1,587 US Marines—the largest deployment yet—completed a six-month training rotation there. Darwin is well situated not only to improve interoperability of US and Australian forces, but to engage with regional partners—as seen in the multilateral naval exercise Kakadu 2018. As Ben Rhodes recently commented, the deployment of US Marines was carefully chosen to send a message to Beijing that Washington will work closely with its ­allies in this part of the world.

From a Japanese perspective, even despite the improvement in Sino-Japanese relations, Abe’s visit to Darwin may send a clear signal to China that Japan has neither drifted away from the US–Japan alliance nor abandoned its balancing approach against China’s military assertiveness. Abe’s visit to Darwin complements the joint statement from the ‘2+2’ meeting of the Japanese and Australian defence and foreign ministers this year that articulated their ‘commitment to increasing the complexity and sophistication of military exercises’. Given that the SDF acquired its own amphibious forces in March, more access to Darwin, along with the presence of US Marines, contributes to the capacity-building of the SDF amphibious brigade and allows for greater collaboration with US and Australian forces.

Second is the economic purpose. Although the building of a free, open and rules-based economic order through the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is the key issue for the meeting with Morrison, the Japanese leader’s visit to the Northern Territory puts Japan’s economic presence back in the limelight.

Abe is visiting the Ichthys LNG project, which takes gas from fields off the Kimberley coast and pipes it to Bladin Point near Darwin. Japan’s Inpex Corporation has a 60% share as an operator in the project, which is expected to produce LNG for 40 years, mainly for Japan. This will help the Northern Territory economically and alleviate reliance on China as a source of investment. From the Japanese, and maybe Australian, perspective, underinvestment in the NT risks inducing abrupt foreign investment in key military sites, like that which occurred with the 99-year lease of the Darwin port to Chinese company Landbridge in 2015. The Ichthys project will showcase the openness, transparency, economic efficiency and financial soundness entailed in the promotion of Japan’s ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy or vision.

The economic aspect of this visit goes beyond bilateral relations. Given that Abe will head directly to Port Moresby from Darwin, the meeting with Morrison allows the leaders to compare notes on their commitment to the Pacific islands, especially the connectivity of the region. Canberra is apparently concerned about China’s growing economic presence in the region and potential military presence through infrastructure development in Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Morrison’s announcement of a $2 billion fund for infrastructure development reflects those concerns. Japanese foreign minister Taro Kono is also concerned about those countries’ indebtedness to China. Abe is expected to follow up the joint statement of the 2+2 meeting with concrete proposals to make the free and open Indo-Pacific strategy a tangible and attractive alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative among the countries of the South Pacific.

As pointed out elsewhere, this visit marks a further step forward in the process of historical reconciliation between Japan and Australia. Canberra and Tokyo have cemented their ties and built trust ever since the 1957 commerce agreement. Abe’s speech at the Australian parliament in 2014 in which he expressed sincere condolences for the tragedies of Kokoda and Sandakan marked another stage in this process. Thus, the Darwin visit may alleviate, if not eliminate, any remaining ill feeling among the Australian people about the Japanese bombing of Darwin during World War II. This important symbolic step, akin to Abe’s visit to Pearl Harbor in 2016, demonstrates a rejection of nationalism in Japanese foreign policy approaches in favour of historical reconciliation.

Abe’s Darwin visit is both timely and purposeful. The outcome of the trip depends on whether both governments can follow up with concrete action like progressing the reciprocal access agreement and RCEP negotiations, and cooperating on capacity-building and infrastructure initiatives in the Pacific. That said, the meeting is also happening at a time when Japan, Australia and other partners are set to play greater roles in protecting the rules-based order from continued assertive and revisionist behaviour by China, especially in the South and East China Seas, and from unilateral and isolationist American economic policy. As allies of the US and economic partners to many countries throughout the region, Japan and Australia have to do more to build a solid partnership that can collectively stand against the challenges to the regional order.

Sabah, the PLA Navy and Northern Australia

Sabah Port

In a quiet but undoubtedly significant event, Admiral Wu Shengli (吴胜利), commander of the People’s Liberation Army Navy and a member of the PRC’s Central Military Commission recently visited Malaysia with an entourage of 10 senior officials. During his visit, Admiral Wu secured agreement from the Malaysian Navy for the ships of the PLA Navy to use the port of Kota Kinabalu in Malaysian Borneo as a ‘stopover location’ to ‘strengthen defence ties between the two countries’.

What’s remarkable is the environment in which this agreement has been reached. China’s military vessels have been active in Malaysia’s territorial waters off Borneo from 2011. Since 2013, the number of Chinese naval and coast guard vessels patrolling and anchoring around Malaysia’s Luconia Shoals and James Shoal, both of which are within Malaysia’s exclusive economic zone, has increased greatly, and PRC territory markers have been erected on the latter.

In June, National Security Minister Shahidan Kassim said that Malaysia would protest to China about the PRC Coast Guard ship long anchored in Malaysian waters at Luconia Shoals, while legislators voiced their unhappiness with the situation. The Malaysian Foreign Ministry has more recently been lodging weekly protests with Beijing over the presence of the Chinese ship in the area. While the anchored PRC ship is being monitored, there have been reports that Malaysian fishermen are still being driven away from the shoals by Chinese threats to facilitate Chinese fishing boats’ exploitation of the area.

Further, only a day after Admiral Wu left Malaysia, the Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Home Affairs, Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, visited Sabah and started berating ‘a regional superpower’ which has built facilities on three atolls just 155km from Sabah and ‘3,218km from its mainland’. ‘To claim this part of the South China Sea as theirs due to historical narrative is invalid,’ the Deputy Prime Minister Zahid noted.

Why then do we have this agreement now by the Malaysian Navy for Chinese navy port access to Sabah? And which part of the Malaysian administration was responsible for approving it?

Access to a northern Borneo port has long been an ambition of the PLA Navy in its efforts to expand control in the South China Sea. Two years ago, in a Strategist posting entitled Xi Jinping and the Sabah enigma, I noted how Xi Jinping’s planned visit to Sabah (subsequently aborted) reflected PRC efforts to increase links with that key region of northern Borneo. Chinese naval personnel first visited Kota Kinabalu in August 2013.

Later that year, direct contact between Malaysia’s Naval Region Command 2 (Mawilla 2) and China’s Southern Sea Fleet Command was initiated and Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein invited China’s Defence Minister, General Chang Wanquan (常万全), to visit the Royal Malaysian Navy base in Teluk Sepanggar, Sabah, to jointly launch the tie-up. At the same time, Malaysia and China announced joint military exercises for 2014, eventually held in 2015 in the Strait of Malacca. A PRC consulate was established in Kota Kinabalu in April 2015 and the new consul-general began by urging that Chinese-language signs be erected across Sabah.

But back to Admiral Wu’s journey. During his current peregrination, Admiral Wu is visiting Malaysia, Indonesia and the Maldives, undoubtedly reflecting Chinese naval access aspirations in those three regions. This is one of three trips to neighbouring countries by senior PRC military officials this month. Admiral Sun Jianguo (孙建国), Deputy Chief of the PLA General Staff Department, accompanied Xi Jinping on his visit to Vietnam in early November. General Fan Changlong (范长龙), Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, is also currently leading a military delegation to Pakistan and India. A Global Times commentary suggests that all three trips are related to expanding China’s maritime interests.

In the light of these visits and increasing PRC maritime assertiveness, only the most innocent would, on observing the location of Darwin between the South China Sea and the Indian and South Pacific Oceans, conclude that the PLA Navy would not likewise be interested in securing access to and facilities in the port of Darwin. Particularly if it was under the control of a Chinese enterprise for the coming century.

Northern Australia: how much defence is enough?

KowariI was pleased to be asked to speak a few weeks ago at the ADM Northern Australia Defence Summit in Darwin. I hadn’t been there since 2006, and it was interesting to see just how much the city had changed in that time. Clearly the resources boom has had an impact in our northernmost capital.

I was asked to talk about the opportunities that might flow the way of northern Australia from future defence policy changes. It was an interesting topic that got me pondering on which of the historic and current elements of the defence presence in the north were likely to endure. Here’s the answer I came up with, and I’d be interested to hear from readers who agree (and even more interested to hear from those who don’t).

Let’s start with some factors that don’t apply any more. There was a time when a military presence was required to assert sovereignty over a very sparsely populated area. That’s clearly untrue now—while the population still isn’t large, there’s no serious dispute over who owns it. Read more